Newark's police work shouldn't be a secret

SARAH SIMONIS/FOR THE STAR-LEDGERNewark Police recruits take their oath.For weeks I’ve seen cars parked in the lot next to a supposedly empty police building on Irvington Avenue in the Ivy Hill area of Newark’s West Ward. Since several of the cars had license plate frames that said "Fraternal Order of Police," I banged on the doors and called out to see what was going on in the building. I never got a response.

I decided to try again after 50 Ivy Hill residents marched in a cold rain one night calling out a list of demands that included more police presence and full staffing of that facility, which was originally built to be a mini-precinct.

So Tuesday at 7:20 a.m., I parked in the lot. Twenty minutes and a couple of Suduko puzzles later, a plainclothes detective showed up. I asked what unit he was with. TARU: technical assistance response unit, he said. What does TARU do? I asked. It provides technical assistance to other units, he said. He wasn’t rude, just not chatty, and he walked up the back steps and opened the door.

If you watch Law and Order, the technical assistance guys are the ones who do things like running video surveillance and pulling information off computers that were supposed to have been erased. In real-life New York City, where Newark’s Police Director Garry McCarthy was a police official, TARU stirred up some controversy over how it decided what protests and marches to videotape.

Now, surveillance is a tricky issue in a city such where crime is high. The Ivy Hill residents who marched last week were calling for more surveillance. They said city officials had promised anti-crime surveillance cameras for the neighborhood after three college kids were killed and a fourth gravely wounded in a shooting behind Mount Vernon School in 2007. West Ward Councilman Ronald Rice said he had given $300,000 from his discretionary fund to pay for the cameras. Where were they?

The Ivy Hill marchers also wanted several officers who had been assigned to new shifts reassigned to their old duties in the neighborhood. Officers Michael Beasley and George Torres were the focus of that demand. The two had been working Monday through Friday daytime to concentrate on the schools. They know the area and the kids and they make a difference, said Houston Stevens, president of the Ivy Hill Neighborhood Association. Stevens seemed to feel the Newark Police Department was "disrespecting" the community by moving those officers to general patrol duties.

Certainly, the Mount Vernon murders, and several that happened before that tragedy, prove the need for good, effective, plugged-in policing on nights and weekends. The job is to do both. But a community that knows its police by name and supports them has to be a plus in any police department’s effort to fight crime.

I talked to McCarthy about the points the Ivy Hill protestors raised. He said the NPD and the police union had come to an agreement about allowing certain officers, like Beasley and Torres, to continue special duties; its being reviewed by the city’s law department.

As for the surveillance cameras, the money Rice provided should buy about a dozen cameras. They are on the way, McCarthy said; it will be a while before they are ready.

The facility on Irvington Avenue? TARU is there, McCarthy said, and its job is to use technology to fight crime. Other special units are going to be assigned to the facility, but it will not be a mini-precinct. The NPD thinks taking officers off the street to staff the desks of a mini-precinct would be a step backward.

That makes sense. But why keep people in the dark about what the department is doing?

In addition to creating new high-tech crime fighting tools, the NPD needs to listen to the community’s call for more hands-on policing. Together, the police and concerned residents can be powerful allies.